Tag: Richard’s Poor Almanac

And now I’ll cover the handful of comic strips which ran last week and which didn’t fit in my Sunday report. And link to a couple of comics that ultimately weren’t worth discussion in their own right, mostly because they were repeats of ones I’ve already discussed. I have been trimming rerun comics out of my daily reading. But there are ones I like too much to give up, at least not right now.

Bud Blake’s Tiger for the 25th has Tiger quizzing Punkinhead on counting. The younger kid hasn’t reached the point where he can work out numbers without a specific physical representation. It would come, if he were in one of those comics where people age.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 24th is an optimization problem, and an expectation value problem. The wisdom-seeker searches for the most satisfying life. The mathematician-guru offers an answer based in probability and expectation values. List all the possible outcomes, and how probable each are, and how much of the relevant quantity you get (or lose) with each outcome. This is a quite utilitarian view of life-planning. Finding the best possible outcome, given certain constraints, is another big field of mathematics.

John Atkinson’s Wrong Hands for the 26th is a nonsense-equation panel. It’s built on a cute idea. If you do wan to know how many bears you can fit in the kitchen you would need something like this. Not this, though. You can tell by the dimensions. ‘x’, as the area of the kitchen, has units of, well, area. Square feet, or square meters, or square centimeters, or whatever is convenient to measure its area. The average volume of a bear, meanwhile, has units of … volume. Cubic feet, or cubic meters, or cubic centimeters, or the like. The one divided by the other has units of one-over-distance.

And I don’t know what the units of desire to have bears in your kitchen are, but I’m guessing it’s not “bear-feet”, although that would be worth a giggle. The equation would parse more closely if y were the number of bears that can fit in a square foot, or something similar. I say all this just to spoil Atkinson’s fine enough bit of nonsense.

Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 26th is a joke built on inappropriate extrapolation. 3520 seconds is a touch under an hour. Skippy’s pace, if he could keep it up, would be running a mile every five minutes, 52 seconds. That pace isn’t impossible — I find it listed on charts for marathon runners. But that would be for people who’ve trained to be marathon or other long-distance runners. They probably have different fifty-yard run times.

And now for some of the recent comics that didn’t seem worth their own discussion, and why they didn’t.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 20th features reciting the digits of π as a pointless macho stunt. There are people who make a deal of memorizing digits of π. Everyone needs hobbies, and memorizing meaningless stuff is a traditional fanboy’s way of burying oneself in the thing appreciated. Me, I can give you π to … I want to say sixteen digits. I might have gone farther in my youth, but I was heartbroken when I learned one of the digits I had memorized I got wrong, and so after correcting that mess I gave up going farther.

The first, important, thing is that I have not disappeared or done something worse. I just had one of those weeks where enough was happening that something had to give. I could either write up stuff for my mathematics blog, or I could feel guilty about not writing stuff up for my mathematics blog. Since I didn’t have time to do both, I went with feeling guilty about not writing, instead. I’m hoping this week will give me more writing time, but I am fooling only myself.

Second is that Comics Kingdom has, for all my complaining, gotten less bad in the redesign. Mostly in that the whole comics page loads at once, now, instead of needing me to click to “load more comics” every six strips. Good. The strips still appear in weird random orders, especially strips like Prince Valiant that only run on Sundays, but still. I can take seeing a vintage Boner’s Ark Sunday strip six unnecessary times. The strips are still smaller than they used to be, and they’re not using the decent, three-row format that they used to. And the archives don’t let you look at a week’s worth in one page. But it’s less bad, and isn’t that all we can ever hope for out of the Internet anymore?

And finally, Comic Strip Master Command wanted to make this an easy week for me by not having a lot to write about. It got so light I’ve maybe overcompensated. I’m not sure I have enough to write about here, but, I don’t want to completely vanish either.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 15th is … hm. Well, it’s not an anthropomorphic-numerals joke. It is some kind of wordplay, making concrete a common phrase about, and attitude toward, numbers. I could make the fussy difference between numbers and numerals here but I’m not sure anyone has the patience for that.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 17th touches around mathematics without, I admit, necessarily saying anything specific. The angel(?) welcoming the man to heaven mentions creating new systems of mathematics as some fit job for the heavenly host. The discussion of creating self-consistent physics systems seems mathematical in nature too. I’m not sure whether saying one could “attempt” to create self-consistent physics is meant to imply that our universe’s physics are not self-consistent. To create a “maximally complex reality using the simplest possible constructions” seems like a mathematical challenge as well. There are important fields of mathematics built on optimizing, trying to create the most extreme of one thing subject to some constraints or other.

I think the strip’s premise is the old, partially a joke, concept that God is a mathematician. This would explain why the angel(?) seems to rate doing mathematics or mathematics-related projects as so important. But even then … well, consider. There’s nothing about designing new systems of mathematics that ordinary mortals can’t do. Creating new physics or new realities is beyond us, certainly, but designing the rules for such seems possible. I think I understood this comic better then I had thought about it less. Maybe including it in this column has only made trouble for me.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 17th amuses me by making a strip out of a logic paradox. It’s not quite your “this statement is a lie” paradox, but it feels close to that, to me. To have the first chicken call it “Birthday Paradox” also teases a familiar probability problem. It’s not a true paradox. It merely surprises people who haven’t encountered the problem before. This would be the question of how many people you need to have in a group before there’s a 50 percent (75 percent, 99 percent, whatever you like) chance of at least one pair sharing a birthday.

And I notice on Wikipedia a neat variation of this birthday problem. This generalization considers splitting people into two distinct groups, and how many people you need in each group to have a set chance of a pair, one person from each group, sharing a birthday. Apparently both a 32-person group of 16 women and 16 men, or a 49-person group of 43 women and six men, have a 50% chance of some woman-man pair sharing a birthday. Neat.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 18th sports a bit of wordplay. It’s built on how multiplication and division also have meanings in biology. … If I’m not mis-reading my dictionary, “multiply” meant any increase in number first, and the arithmetic operation we now call multiplication afterwards. Division, similarly, meant to separate into parts before it meant the mathematical operation as well. So it might be fairer to say that multiplication and division are words that picked up mathematical meaning.

People reading my Reading the Comics post Sunday maybe noticed something. I mean besides my correct, reasonable complaining about the Comics Kingdom redesign. That is that all the comics were from before the 30th of March. That is, none were from the week before the 7th of April. The last full week of March had a lot of comic strips. The first week of April didn’t. So things got bumped a little. Here’s the results. It wasn’t a busy week, not when I filter out the strips that don’t offer much to write about. So now I’m stuck for what to post Thursday.

The strip explains things well enough. The Library holds every book that will ever be written. In the original story there are some constraints. Particularly, all the books are 410 pages. If you wanted, say, a 600-page book, though, you could find one book with the first 410 pages and another book with the remaining 190 pages and then some filler. The catch, as explained in the story and in the comic strip, is finding them. And there is the problem of finding a ‘correct’ text. Every possible text of the correct length should be in there. So every possible book that might be titled Mark Twain vs Frankenstein, including ones that include neither Mark Twain nor Frankenstein, is there. Which is the one you want to read?

Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie for the 4th features an equal-divisions problem. In principle, it’s easy to divide a pizza (or anything else) equally; that’s what we have fractions for. Making them practical is a bit harder. I do like Jughead’s quick work, though. It’s got the slight-of-hand you expect from stage magic.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 4th takes place in an algebra class. I’m not sure what algebraic principle demonstrates, but it probably came from somewhere. It’s 4,829,210. The exponentials on the blackboard do cue the reader to the real joke, of the sign reading “kick10 me”. I question whether this is really an exponential kicking situation. It seems more like a simple multiplication to me. But it would be harder to make that joke read clearly.

Tony Cochran’s Agnes for the 5th is part of a sequence investigating how magnets work. Agnes and Trout find just … magnet parts inside. This is fair. It’s even mathematics.

Thermodynamics classes teach one of the great mathematical physics models. This is about what makes magnets. Magnets are made of … smaller magnets. This seems like question-begging. Ultimately you get down to individual molecules, each of which is very slightly magnetic. When small magnets are lined up in the right way, they can become a strong magnet. When they’re lined up in another way, they can be a weak magnet. Or no magnet at all.

How do they line up? It depends on things, including how the big magnet is made, and how it’s treated. A bit of energy can free molecules to line up, making a stronger magnet out of a weak one. Or it can break up the alignments, turning a strong magnet into a weak one. I’ve had physics instructors explain that you could, in principle, take an iron rod and magnetize it just by hitting it hard enough on the desk. And then demagnetize it by hitting it again. I have never seen one do this, though.

This is more than just a physics model. The mathematics of it is … well, it can be easy enough. A one-dimensional, nearest-neighbor model, lets us describe how materials might turn into magnets or break apart, depending on their temperature. Two- or three-dimensional models, or models that have each small magnet affected by distant neighbors, are harder.

There’s two types of comics for the second of last week’s review. There’s some strips that are reruns. There’s some that just use mathematics as a shorthand for something else. There’s four strips in all.

John Deering’s Strange Brew for the 6th uses mathematics as shorthand for demonstrating intelligence. There’s no making particular sense out of the symbols, of course. And I’d think it dangerous that Lucky seems to be using both capital X and lowercase x in the same formula. There’s often times one does use the capital and lowercase versions of a letter in a formula. This is usually something like “x is one element of the set X, which is all the possible candidates for some thing”. In that case, you might get the case wrong, but context would make it clear what you meant. But, yes, sometimes there’s no sensible alternative and then you have to be careful.

Randy Glasbergen’s Glasbergen Cartoons for the 6th uses mathematics as shorthand for a hard subject. It’s certainly an economical notation. Alas, you don’t just learn from your mistakes. You learn from comparing your mistakes to a correct answer. And thinking about why you made the mistakes you did, and how to minimize or avoid those mistakes again.

So how would I do this problem? Well, carrying out the process isn’t too hard. But what do I expect the answer to be, roughly? To me, I look at this and reason: 473 is about 500. So 473 x 17 is about 500 x 17. 500 x 17 is 1000 times eight-and-a-half. So start with “about 8500”. That’s too high, obviously. I can do better. 8500 minus some correction. What correction? Well, 473 is roughly 500 minus 25. So I’ll subtract 25 times 17. Which isn’t hard, because 25 times 4 is 100. So 25 times 17? That’s 25 times 16 plus 25 times 1. 25 times 16 is 100 times 4. So 25 times 17 is 425. 8500 minus 425 is 8075. I’m still a bit high, by 2 times 17. 2 times 17 is 34. So subtract 34 from 8075: it should be about 8041.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 7th is a joke built on jargon. Every field has its jargon. Some of it will be safely original terms: people’s names (“Bessel function”) or synthetic words (“isomorphism”) that can’t be easily confused with everyday language. But some of it will be common terms given special meaning. “Right” angles and “right” triangles. “Normal” numbers. “Group”. “Right” as a description for angles and triangles goes back a long way, at least to — well, Merriam-Webster.com says 15th century. But EtymologyOnline says late 14th century. Neither offers their manuscripts. I’ll chalk it up to differences in how they interpret the texts. And possibly differences in whether they would count, say, a reference to “a right angle” written in French or German rather than in English directly.

Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac for the 7th has been run before. It references the Infinite Monkey Theorem. The monkeys this time around write up a treasury of Western Literature, not merely the canon of Shakespeare. That’s at least as impressive a feat. Also, while this is a rerun — sad to say Richard Thompson died in 2016, and was forced to retire from drawing before that — his work was fantastic and deserves attention.

So one comic strip was technically on point all this week, without ever quite giving me a specific thing to talk about. And I came to conclude there was another comic strip I could drop from my consideration. Which all were they? Read on.

Frank Page’s Bob the Squirrel for the 18th of February isn’t really about the Rubik’s Cube. It’s just something to occupy Bob’s mind until a deeper mystery emerges. Rubik’s Cubes, meanwhile, are everyone’s favorite group theory pastime, although I’m not sure how many people have learned group theory starting from that point. Where flies come from in the middle of winter I don’t know. We’ve been dealing with box elder bugs ourselves. (We’ve been scooping them up and tossing them outside where they can hopefully find the trees they should be using instead.)

Jack Pullan’s Boomerangs rerun for the 20th is one that mentions entropy and that I’ve already talked about at least twice before. These were times in January 2017 and also in November 2013. Given that the strip’s no longer in production and that I’m clearly on at least my third go-round I suppose I’ll retire it from my daily read. I’m curious why, if it was about 14 months between the last appearance and this appearance of this strip, why I didn’t have it at all in 2015 or 2016. Maybe I missed it, or it came a week there was enough to write about that I didn’t need to include a marginal strip.

Christopher Grady’s Lunarbaboon for the 20th is intended to be a heartwarming little story of encouragement and warm feelings. (Most Lunarbaboon strips are intended to be a heartwarming little story of encouragement and warm feelings.) That it’s mathematics the kid struggles with is incidental to the story setup. But it does make it easy to picture a kid struggling and a couple kind words offering some motivation, or at least better feelings.

Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac for the 20th is a casual mention of sudoku and a publication error that would supposedly have made it impossible. If the numbers were transposed consistently — everything that ought to have been a ‘2’ printed as a ‘5’, and everything that ought to have been ‘5’ printed as ‘2’ — the problem would be exactly as solvable. This is why you can sometimes see sudoku-type puzzles that use symbols or letters or other characters. But if, say, the third and the second rows were transposed then there’s a chance the incorrect puzzle would be solvable. Transposing a bunch of squares, like, the top three rows with the bottom three rows, wouldn’t make the puzzle unsolvable. This serves as a reminder that if you make enough mistakes you can still turn out all right, a comforting message for our times. Also I know I’ve featured Richard’s Poor Almanac several times over, but I’m a Richard Thompson fan so I’m not dropping that from my feed.

Will Henry’s Wallace the Brave — to be newspaper-syndicated from the 26th of March, by the way, and I’m glad for that as Wallace and I share the same favorite pinball game — just mentions mathematics as a subject Wallace isn’t thinking enough about. I’m also fond of the Loch Ness Monster, so, all the better.

I’m not surprised that this seems to be the first time I’ve had Lunarbabboon tagged. I am surprised that Bob the Squirrel seems not to have been tagged here before. Maybe I didn’t give the tag suggested-completion enough time to figure out what to do with ‘bob the’. We’ve been having odd little net glitches that mostly pass quickly, but that kill any sort of client-side Javascript-based page rendering. You know, like every web page does anymore because somehow “the web server puts together a bunch of stuff and transmits that to the reader” is too inefficient a system.

So I was travelling last week, and this threw nearly all my plans out of whack. We stayed at one of those hotels that’s good enough that its free Internet is garbage and they charge you by day for decent Internet. So naturally Comic Strip Master Command sent a flood of posts. I’m trying to keep up and we’ll see if I wrap up this past week in under three essays. And I am not helped, by the way, by GoComics.com rejiggering something on their server so that My Comics Page won’t load, and breaking their “Contact Us” page so that that won’t submit error reports. If someone around there can break in and turn one of their servers off and on again, I’d appreciate the help.

Hy Eisman’s Katzenjammer Kids for the 21st of January is a curiously-timed Tax Day joke. (Well, the Katzenjammer Kids lapsed into reruns a dozen years ago and there’s probably not much effort being put into selecting seasonally appropriate ones.) But it is about one of the oldest and still most important uses of mathematics, and one that never gets respect.

Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals rerun for the 21st gets Oliver the reputation for being a little computer because he’s good at arithmetic. There is something that amazes in a person who’s able to calculate like this without writing anything down or using a device to help.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 22nd is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. Well, for Monday, as I write this. It’s got your classic blackboard full of equations for the people in over their head. The equations look to me like gibberish. There’s a couple diagrams of aromatic organic compounds, which suggests some quantum-mechanics chemistry problem, if you want to suppose this could be narrowed down.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 22nd has Luann despair about ever understanding algebra without starting over from scratch and putting in excessively many hours of work. Sometimes it feels like that. My experience when lost in a subject has been that going back to the start often helps. It can be easier to see why a term or a concept or a process is introduced when you’ve seen it used some, and often getting one idea straight will cause others to fall into place. When that doesn’t work, trying a different book on the same topic — even one as well-worn as high school algebra — sometimes helps. Just a different writer, or a different perspective on what’s key, can be what’s needed. And sometimes it just does take time working at it all.

Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac rerun for the 22nd includes as part of a kit of William Shakespeare paper dolls the Typing Monkey. It’s that lovely, whimsical figure that might, in time, produce any written work you could imagine. I think I’d retired monkeys-at-typewriters as a thing to talk about, but I’m easily swayed by Thompson’s art and comic stylings so here it is.

Darrin Bell and Theron Heir’s Rudy Park for the 18th throws around a lot of percentages. It’s circling around the sabermetric-style idea that everything can be quantified, and measured, and that its changes can be tracked. In this case it’s comments on Star Trek: Discovery, but it could be anything. I’m inclined to believe that yeah, there’s an astounding variety of things that can be quantified and measured and tracked. But it’s also easy, especially when you haven’t got a good track record of knowing what is important to measure, to start tracking what amounts to random noise. (See any of my monthly statistics reviews, when I go looking into things like views-per-visitor-per-post-made or some other dubiously meaningful quantity.) So I’m inclined to side with Randy and his doubts that the Math Gods sanction this much data-mining.

Search for Something:

Search for:

And My Humor Blog!

I keep up a daily so far humor blog. Long-form pieces on Thursday evenings. Recaps of the story comics on Sunday evenings, so if you're not following the current Mary Worth or Gil Thorp or Mark Trail storylines, you're welcome.